What sort of monster would create a video game about falling off of a building?

Me. I would. That’s what I did.

Another project for my game development studies at university, Slow Down or You’ll Die!! is my attempt to create a short, 30-second game. It’s easy to control, but one wrong movement, and you can end up like ketchup all over the concrete. It’s a relatively simple game, made purely to showcase my base capabilities as a game designer. I hope you make it to the bottom.

Download Slow Down or You’ll Die!!

Special thanks to Julien Fournell, for his help with the programming.

So I heard you like Star Wars…

Well, what a coincidence, because I do, too! In fact, Star Wars is probably the biggest influential piece of media on my personality. A New Hope is one of the first movies I have the memory of watching, so obviously it was hugely fundamental in forming me into the beautiful ball of nerd that I am today. Between that and my excitement towards the then-newly released The Force Awakens, I felt obligated to create an homage to it.

Which leads to Super Han Solo. Beginning as a project for a Level Design class, I created a short platforming level and art assets to go along with it, where you can control Han Solo as he races across the Tatooine desert to reach the Mos Eisley cantina. Along the way, there are Millennium Falcon tokens to collect, falling pitfalls to avoid, and Chewbaccas to placate.

Download Super Han Solo

Special thanks to Derek Prate, for writing the base code.

Woah, that’s a pretty wordy title. Let’s see if we can condense and contextualize it.

When we play video games, we experience the gameplay (ludology) and the story (narratology) attempting to entertain and immerse us in the game’s universe (no, this won’t be a talk about hyperreality and immersion, but it is related). Developers want us to be immersed in the games they create; they want us to continue playing the game so we praise it and help the developer to sell more units. It really is as utilitarian as it seems. When we cannot immerse ourselves, we aren’t entertained by the game, and we either sell the game back to a retailer, tell our friends not to buy the game, or both. This is something developers attempt to work against. However, due to the sole fact that the game is, in fact, a “game” and not reality, the gameplay often comes into conflict with the story the game is attempting to tell. This, when gameplay and story contradict one another, is ludonarrative dissonance.

Gaming has, quite obviously, evolved in recent years. Whereas in its earliest, arcade years, video games were about obtain the highest scores, games are now about “the experience.” Games try to incorporate you into their worlds, have you empathize with their characters, and positively change you as a person. Above all, though, games try to be fun or interesting, if not both. Regardless of the game’s goals, if you enjoy playing it, you’ll want to share it. In the past, you’d have to invite a friend over and either swap the controller every few turns or play a multiplayer game. Nowadays, modern consoles, like the Playstation 4, have “Share” functions that allow you to post a screenshot or video to the Internet. Video games are best when the experience of play, whether single-player or multiplayer, is shared. And this is best shown through the interactive community of YouTube.

A common element of gaming is immersion. Developers attempt to engage us in the experience of the game, bridging the gap between reality and the virtual experience. A game is considered successfully immersive if the game world becomes real in the mind’s eye of the player. Mass Effect brings us into an intragalactic adventure, while Grand Theft Auto V shows us around a fictionalized Los Angeles. The developers want us to be a part of the world they’ve crafted, so we feel agency in continuing to play and affect the events of the game. There is one game series, however, that bridges the gap between reality and virtuality in a far different way, one series which understands that it is a simulacrum of reality without attempting to create a new reality: Assassin’s Creed.

I, like many other game developers across the world, participated in the 2014 Global Game Jam. Starting with only a theme at 5:00pm on Friday, January 24th, myself and two others created a fully functioning video game by 3:00pm on Sunday the 26th. Now, although my game is no where near the likes of Goat Simulator (if you have not heard of Goat Simulator, look it up; your life will be better for it), it goes to show how drive, focus, and creativity can blend together to build something from practically nothing. My team and I took the theme, “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are,” along with the additional challenge of passing the Bechdel Test, and created The Binds that Hold Us, a puzzle/platformer where players take control of two convicts escaping from prison, each utilizing their own perspective and talents to work together and escape.

The game is not meant to look pretty or play perfectly, but to be an experiment in game development and show off the talents of the people involved.

Download The Binds that Hold Us from the Global Game Jam website.

Special thanks to my co-developers, Carol Liang and Steven Itrich.

I made a thing, I guess.

Some people know that I am not only a writer, but I am a video game developer (in training) and as part of an eight-week long project, myself and a group of two others made a narrative-heavy mod for Neverwinter Nights 2. Please keep in mind, however, that this mod is very buggy and very basic. I am not a programmer, although I am learning, and this was made in eight weeks by a team with zero-experience with programming in C. That being said, we managed to create a working prototype in only eight weeks. It is often said that the hardest part of game development is publishing, and we managed to accomplish that. This is only an example of things to come, as I hope to eventually polish the mod even further and release a fully-functioning 2.0 version. Until that point, please enjoy this 1.1 version. Any and all feedback is appreciated, as QA testing has not been completed.

Thicker than Water – A Valoris Tale follows Aeric Darrowson, a former member of the Bloodwaters Pirates, the most feared organization in the world, as he tries to smuggle his sister out of the group. How will Aeric act in his escape attempt? Will he act with integrity and look out for his sister’s safety? Or is he truly a brigand at heart, displaying only cruelty to others?

Download Thicker than Water – A Valoris Tale (1.1)

Special thanks to LilyAnne Rice and Jonathan Marson, two writers who helped me turn a crazy idea into a somewhat-functioning game.

(Note: you must have a working copy of Neverwinter Nights 2 to run this, as the .mod file is a special file type)